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Video Noise/Grain Reduction
I’m pretty sure that this is an absurd question, and that the answer is no; however, is there anyway to reduce grain/noise in video – particularly that caused by needing to apply gain settings during a shoot.
I have quite a bit of footage shot in very low light; which my Canon XH-A1 seems to handle very well; regardless, I was forced to use gain part of the time, and would like to somehow increase the image quality.
Any suggestions, tips, plug-ins, etc.?
As always, thanks in advance.
Craig
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7 Replies
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Nattress has some grain reduction plug-ins but grain reduction is just a softening of the image. Color has some outstanding tools for grain reduction built in by applying very light blur to the individual color channels that have the worst noise in them.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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The Nattress filters are pretty good, but they do just soften the grain. After Effects does a great job also.
Have a wonderful day.
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Craig
CHV Repair plugins! Their noise reducer is reaally good, but you gotta use moderation and you have to play around with it, but i like it.
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
Neat Video from neatvideo.com is truly outstanding. (Though they could seriously do with updating their website examples, which don’t give a real idea of its power.)
It’s a plug-in for After Effects (which I haven’t tried) and the open-source VirtualDub (which I have), amongst others. The downside is that it’s currently only available for Windows (Mac version in the works apparently).
That said, if you have Intel machines, it works fine in Parallels, etc. We had to do some e x t r e m e noise reduction on HVX200 footage shot at night with way too much gain. I really thought it might be unsalvageable. The mixed-platform workflow was tricky (with VirtualDub/Windows/Mac codec issues: we ended up creating IFF image sequences of the shots) but the results were absolutely amazing.
Spend some time learning the advanced interface, and you’ll get results you wouldn’t believe possible.
Ben
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I agree with Neat Video. I just got it for FCP to adjust a shot where the Camera Op had high gain, and it smoothed it out beautifully.
You do get some softening, obviously that’s how these noise reducers work, however, even on close-ups the softening isn’t tragic. My test shot was a framed MS and it looks great.
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Thank you for your post.
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As mentioned- blurring separate channels in Color is a great tool and can be achieved in FCP using ‘Channel Blur’ however, in low light situations where noise is only occurring in the darker regions, a handy way is to isolate the luma in the the noisy areas using the eyedropper tools in ‘limit effect’ in CC 3-way, de-saurate and then whack up the ‘softening’ untill you have a subtle but desirable effect!
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